The Monday Night Cooking School - By Erica Bauermeister Page 0,38

birthday, a friend had taken him to Lillian’s restaurant for dinner. “Charlie would want you to be around food on her birthday, buddy,” he had said, “and Lillian’s will make even you want to eat.”

It was August, the leaves on the cherry trees in the restaurant garden green and full when they walked up the path to Lillian’s. They sat on the porch in the large Adirondack chairs with glasses of red wine as they waited for a table, listening to the hum of conversation about them, the clink of silverware coming through the open windows of the dining room inside. Tom felt his mind slowing, coming to rest in the serenity of the garden surrounding them.

When they were finally seated in the wood-paneled dining room, a waitress came up to their table and greeted them.

“We have a wonderful seafood special tonight,” she announced. “Lillian found beautiful fresh clams and mussels at the seafood market today and she is serving them over homemade angel hair pasta in a sauce of butter, garlic, and wine, with just a bit of red pepper flakes and…” The waitress stopped, flustered at her lack of memory.

“Oregano,” Tom said quietly.

“Yes,” the waitress responded, relieved. “Thank you. How did you know?”

“Lucky guess,” Tom said, raising his glass in a silent toast. He looked down at the table in front of him, concentrating on the weave of the linen cloth, the curve of the handle of his fork, the cut-glass lines of the small, round bowl filled with sea salt and fennel.

Then Tom noticed a folded chocolate-colored placard, almost hidden behind the bowl of salt. He picked up the small sign and read the cream-colored script flowing across the surface.

Announcing:

The new session of

The School of Essential Ingredients

“CLASS, I think we are ready,” Lillian called over her shoulder, as she emptied the pasta from the huge pot into a colander. “Now all we need are plates.”

As Lillian transferred the steaming spaghetti noodles from the colander to a heavy ceramic bowl, the students stood up obediently and went to the shelves, passing white pasta plates from one person to the next like a fireman’s brigade. They lined up in front of the counter, jokingly jostling each other. Lillian carried over the big blue bowl and began placing a serving of pasta on each plate.

“Tom,” she said, turning to him, “you do the honors with the sauce. It’s yours, after all.” She watched as he ladled the first fragrant red spoonful onto a waiting bed of creamy-yellow pasta. When everyone was served, the class settled into groups in the chairs, talking companionably before taking their first bites, after which the room dissolved into a silence interrupted only by the sounds of forks against plates and the occasional sigh of satisfaction.

“Look at what you did,” Lillian remarked quietly, standing next to Tom at the counter.

“They’ll eat it,” he said, “and then it’ll be gone.”

“That’s what makes it a gift,” Lillian replied.

Chloe

Chloe had met Jake at the bar and grill where she got her first job, bussing tables. Bussing wasn’t what she had set out to do, but when you’ve just graduated from high school and don’t know how you’d pay for college even if your father thought you could get in, bussing tables can seem like a good option. Unless you have a tendency to drop things, which Chloe did.

She was sitting on the back stoop of the restaurant, crying her way through her fifteen-minute lunch break when she felt someone drop down on the step beside her, and smelled meat, fresh off the grill.

“Thought you might need this,” said Jake, handing her a burger. Chloe stared at him. Jake was tall, with that black-cat grace reserved for grill cooks and high school athletes, and curls that tangled their way lazily down his neck to his collar. As a cook, he was supposed to wear a hair net, but people didn’t tell Jake things like that. Jake was the guy, the one all the waitresses hoped would snap their orders down off the revolving cook’s wheel, not just because he was gorgeous, but because he could turn around four burgers, a fish sandwich, a Caesar salad, and a clam-sauce pasta for that seven-top you forgot about until they grabbed your elbow and asked where their food was and said it better be there in the next five minutes or they were walking out, and with Jake you knew that in four and a half minutes there you would be with all